{"id":4363,"date":"2016-09-17T18:46:53","date_gmt":"2016-09-17T18:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kelolandblogs.com\/lundatlarge\/?p=4363"},"modified":"2023-07-20T21:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-07-20T21:00:00","slug":"rain-and-worms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/rain-and-worms\/","title":{"rendered":"Rain And Worms"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the time many of you read this, the skies will be crystal clear and me rambling on about summertime downpours and all-day soakers, will seem odd. But this September day has been a wet one mixed with extended periods of deluge and gentle raindrops falling on my head.<\/p>\n

To be honest, I love days like this. In part, I suppose, because my personality can be\u2026and often is.. as gloomy as the skies. But, more than that, I just like the experience of being surrounded by a good, non-threatening life-giving rain that lasts a while; unlike those lightning and thunder filled downpours driven by hurricane force winds that come and go with frightening speed causing flooded basements, power outages and interviews on the news with long faced people standing in their front yards next to a hundred year old cottonwood tree that their great granddad planted and now lies in a giant crumpled heap on the ground.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been known to stand out in a warm summer rain and just look skyward allowing the soft droplets to splat against my face and think about my youth when you might find me\u00a0strolling the sidewalks of my little town imagining myself as god with the power to grant worms,\u00a0 who had ventured from their comfortable confines underground to bask on the dangerous but still warm concrete, life or death.\u00a0 I was a good god, for the most part, granting every squiggly creature at my feet a second chance to redeem themselves unless, of course, there were just too many on the cement to dodge and their souls wound up squished by my soles.<\/p>\n

In 1950, dad bought the property for our house in Volga from Joe Dahm..who ran the local bait and tackle shop.\u00a0 Eventually, we kids discovered that for years, Joe had been seeding that lot with night crawlers from his store where they would be fruitful and multiply in the rich black dirt.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until my parents started digging up the back yard for mom\u2019s garden that they discovered loads of the big worms at every turn of the fork.<\/p>\n

By the time our house was built and for a few years following, nobody thought much about the huge night crawler population wiggling away just a few inches below our feet but soon, kids in the neighborhood heard that the new owner of the bait shop was paying 25 cents a dozen for them especially when the fish were biting at lakes Campbell, Goldsmith, Oakwood, Poinsett and Sinai.<\/p>\n

Well, it wasn\u2019t long before young entrepreneurs in my town began prowling the neighborhoods after dark with their flashlights trying to capture worms which, in search of fresh air I suppose, had ventured far enough out of their holes to fall victim to the lightning fast reflexes of youth and wind up in a Butter Nut Coffee can where..when enough had been gathered.. would be redeemed for cold hard cash at Jones\u2019 bait shop.\"nightcrawlers<\/a><\/p>\n

I never thought much about worms; either angleworms or night crawlers..other than I found them disgusting. Not as disgusting as tape worms which reportedly would lodge in a little kid\u2019s guts and grow to great lengths before being expelled in the biffy after the administration of prescribed treatment from the doc. I don\u2019t know anybody who had a tapeworm..but then all my friends and family preferred their meat prepared as God intended: well done.<\/p>\n

I did know lots of kids..mostly farm kids\u2026who came to class with a telltale ring on their head..etched there like a crop circle by what we assumed was..because of the name..a worm.<\/p>\n

Turns out ringworm isn\u2019t a worm at all but a highly contagious fungus often picked up from animals or other infected humans.<\/p>\n

I am instinctively fearful of snakes and have always put worms in that category of creatures I\u2019d rather not touch. But as a youngster, \u00a0it was the lure of great wealth that helped me overcome such phobias when I learned that Jones Bait Shop was paying big money for night crawlers and I was living atop a gold mine.<\/p>\n

Still, I would never have ventured out and after them had it not been for a kid by the name of Lanny Lee. I really don\u2019t know too much about Lanny except he was a little older than me and was living with his grandpa or uncle; \u00a0Oscar Lee in Volga who was a gifted artist but had to earn his meager income by painting houses and other buildings.<\/p>\n

Lanny was memorable for his small stature..his dark complexation and a speech impediment in which his L\u2019s and R\u2019s became W\u2019s\u2026much like Bawey Kwipke on \u201cBig Bang Theory.\u201d\u00a0 Unfortunately,\u00a0 Oscar\u2019s grandson was cursed to have both his first and last name begin with L. which made him vulnerable to insensitive teasing by classmates; Wanny Wee\u2026wapped all up in toiwet papew. I\u2019m ashamed to admit it now but I was among those cruel clods. \u00a0 \u00a0Surprisingly, though, \u00a0Wanny..I mean Lanny..never really let on that he was bothered by it. \u00a0\u00a0He was too preoccupied by cashing in on the crawler crop and, through Oscar, he knew just where to look; our yard!<\/p>\n

Many nights..way after bedtime..I\u2019d hear a tap, tap tap on the screen of our bedroom window and hear this; \u201cDoug..you awake?\u00a0 It\u2019s Wanny. Wanna hunt night cwa-wers?\u201d \u00a0 I’d \u00a0round up a flashlight grab a coffee can and quietly sneak out the back door where I\u2019d join him in our great quest.<\/p>\n

It was Wanny..er, Lanny who taught me how to put a red handkerchief over the flashlight lens so as not to spook the worms which would venture most of the way out of their holes especially on a rainy night. Then you had to make sure to snatch them with lightning speed and hang on tight. Not too tight, though, because once in our grasp, night crawlers had an incredible ability to \u00a0slither back into their holes with inexplicable power. Without proper finesse and pumping action, they\u2019d break in two.<\/p>\n

Some nights it was a real bonanza and we\u2019d manage to extract four dozen or more worms which had to be kept alive long enough to collect our two dollars from the bait shop. It finally dawned on me after sneaking back into the house after three back breaking hours had passed, that we weren\u2019t going to get rich at this.<\/p>\n

Soon after, my dad bought a power lawn mower and I began cutting the grass for several elderly folks in our neighborhood..earning fifty cents a yard\u2026even more if Mrs. Berg was in a generous mood..and I managed to get each one done in a half hour.<\/p>\n

Oh, Lanny would still come around on occasion tap, tap tapping on our window in the middle of the night making his wequest\u2026but I\u2019d had enough.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of those nights on a recent fishing trip in which night crawlers were what the Walleye were hungry for and I had to reach into that Styrofoam bucket filled with cool dirt and a few reluctant worms hiding out at the bottom.<\/p>\n

It still gags me a little to handle those slimy buggers and I continue to marvel at how stwong they are in their wesistance to becoming a tasty tweet for some waweye.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: That gentle rain which inspired this essay turned into the largest one day rain fall in memory..up to and exceeding six inches in places. Hope the night cwa-wers didn’t dwown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By the time many of you read this, the skies will be crystal clear and me rambling on about summertime downpours and all-day soakers, will seem odd. But this September day has been a wet one mixed with extended periods of deluge and gentle raindrops falling on my head. To be honest, I love days…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lund-at-large","category-60","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11530,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363\/revisions\/11530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}